When you pull up on move in day, and finally get a glance at the place you will be living in for the next 9 months, it’s hard to imagine that you’ll ever be able to call it home. It’s full of white cinderblock walls, communal bathrooms, unfamiliar faces, and hours away from where you have grown up. You would never imagine that one day you will never want to leave. Oh how wrong you are.

These halls are filled with laughs shared with strangers that turned into family. The study room is where the stress of school got the best of you, and you had your first breakdown. But it’s also where you finally understood that one math problem that took you an hour to figure out. The door is where you and your friends walked in way too late on the weekends, and where you ran out of when you overslept your mandatory class. Your closet is the place you stared at contemplating if it’s worth getting dressed and going to your 8am, and your bed is where you and your roommate sat on talking until the sun came up. The walls is what you banged on when your neighbors music was too loud, and your door handle is what your friends have relentlessly used to barge into your room to either drag you to dinner or tell you about how they almost got hit by a bike. The bathroom is where you held your friend’s hair when they drank too much, and the lounge is where you and your friends procrastinated that big project way too long. Your desk was where you accidently set off the fire alarm after doing your hair, and where you try. The sidewalk leading up to the dorm is where you ran trying to get into the warmth when it was way too cold, and where you were sure you were going to pass out from the weight of all of your textbooks. The floor is where you sometimes found your roommate asleep after a long night, and had to drag her to bed. I’m not going to lie, everyone is guilty of complaining about living in a glorified shoebox.

Sometimes you wish your closet was bigger so you could fit all of your shoes and it would be nice to not have to share a bathroom with 100 other people. But, thinking about it there is not another time in your life where you are always surrounded by your peers, and ultimately your best friends. In three years from now, it is very unlikely that my best friends will live with me or a few door downs. So to everyone living in my dorm next year, take it all in and enjoy every second.